The Divine Feminine Unveiled
Abridged from “The Divine Feminine Unveiled” by Elizabeth Debold, in
What is Enlightenment? Magazine
“There is a need to move beyond a patriarchy and I see it as critical to our individual and collective evolution (or even survival). The question I want to address is: How do we create a postpatriarchal culture? And how does that relate to the Divine Feminine?”
In this article Debold talks about where our models of masculinity and femininity stem from, arguing that a dramatic obsession with “opposites” divides and frames our thinking today. Generally the “masculine” is related to agency, assertion, and intense directed focus and consciousness, whereas the feminine is related to receptivity, containment and an encompassing depth of being.
The Victorian era, like no time before or since, asserted that gender and sexuality were the core of who we are. They theorised that our experience of being in a male or female body has shaped our psyches and our culture. The Victorian world was divided into separate spheres of activity for women and men and this social dichotomy was justified by the insistence that the two sexes were
natural opposites. If men were strong enough to attend to the messy corrupt world of business and politics, then women were too fragile, too morally chaste and pure to be anywhere but home. Men were seen to be active and full of sexual desire, so therefore woman
must be passive and have no desire.
The insistence on the opposition between masculine and feminine, male and female, is therefore an expression of patriarchy. Celebrating these feminine archetypes as divine only upholds the inner and outer separation and division that our so-called masculine culture is based on. As these archetypes are influenced from the patriarchy from the past, any new culture must move beyond them.
The question is, how?
The current feminine ideal is to be good, beautiful, sexy, all-compassionate, giving and loving. The pallid Victorian ideal casts a shadow across out psyches, so we often see out liberation in terms of reclaiming and celebrating our sexuality, our emotions, and our biology based roles that keep us in sync with nature. It’s uncanny how the latest incarnation of the Divine Feminine brings together the aspects of woman that are most valued within patriarchy – sexuality and mothering.
Until we recognise the whole of what we are made out of, we will continue to project darkness on to men and thereby keep intact the polarizing division that hold patriarchy in place. We can’t replace one extreme with the other... it just reinforces the old-world divide.
We woman can move culture forward and create a future beyond patriarchy. But it will not be easy, nor will it necessarily feel ‘natural’ , especially if we cling to the old-world psyche. There is a need to go beyond our (albeit divine) capacity to reproduce and catch up on the kind of creative thought that the privileged males in our species have developed through trial and error over the past several millennia.
The new goal should be to develop a consciousness that both includes our biological and cultural inheritance and also transcends it, so that a new free space of relationship is created in culture that would catalyze a new partnership between men and women. This would be the new expression of feminine, and given how essential it is for transforming out world, such an endeavour is nothing less than sacred.
“Man can go no further in the pursuit of consciousness until woman catches up with him” – Castillejo
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Originally Posted by justin
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